Christopher Reich - Rules of Deception

The liquid slid down like silk on fire.

A fulsome sadness settled on him. The weight pressed on his shoulders and made the ten steps to the study an epic journey. It was another small room. Immaculate. A metal desk and the Aeron chair that Emma coveted but could never afford. The computer had been removed, but the power cords lay on the floor next to a laser printer. No papers. No notes.

He walked into the bedroom. The sheets had been removed and thrown into the corner. The pillows cut open. The closets held a few outfits. A symphony of black. Armani. Dior. Gucci. Shoes to match. Five and a halfs. Emma’s size. (Why must he constantly check when he already knew?) And one cocktail dress, also black, cut to elicit gasps from the most jaded guest.

Against his will, he imagined Emma walking into the room wearing it. His eyes traveled up her long legs, stopping to admire her cleavage, then taking in the auburn hair that fell in waves to her shoulders. Yes, he decided, it would fulfill its purpose. She’d chosen the perfect attire to serve vodka and caviar for two.

Emma Ransom and Eva Kruger. Two people. Two personalities. But which one was real? How was he supposed to tell the difference between truth and fiction? And if he couldn’t, how had Emma?

It dawned on him that he was a part of it, too. Dr. Jonathan Ransom, globe-trotting physician conveniently stationed in all the world’s hot spots. After all, he’d been moved to Geneva for Emma to be involved in this… in Thor …whatever it was. Why shouldn’t it have happened before?

Jonathan as pawn.

No, not as pawn. As cover.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. The dial tone purred in his ear. He called the international operator and asked for the number of St. Mary’s Hospital, Penzance, England.

“How far back did it go?” he asked himself. Before Beirut, there was Darfur. And before Darfur, Indonesia, Kosovo, and Liberia, where Emma had greeted him in a battered jeep on the airport tarmac.

Where had Emma drawn the line? Or more importantly, when?

Jonathan took down the hospital’s number and dialed it. A pleasant English voice answered and he asked to be transferred to Records. A woman came on the line. “Records.”

“I’m calling from Switzerland. My wife recently died and I need to obtain a copy of her birth certificate for the authorities. She was born in your hospital.”

“I’ll be happy to fax a copy once we receive an official inquiry.”

“I’m sure that won’t be a problem, but right now, I just need to confirm that you have the original document. Her name was Emma Rose. Born November 12, 1975.”

“Give me a minute,” said the woman.

Jonathan tucked the phone under his ear. He was holding Eva Kruger’s wedding ring. It came to him that there was no sign of a Mr. Kruger in the apartment. Why did she have the ring? he wondered. Everything else was so meticulous. An entire double life right down to the false eyelashes.

“Sir, this is Nurse Poole. We found a record of Emma Rose.”

“Good. I mean, thank you.” The news interrupted his musings. It was difficult to speak. He was on the verge of either breaking down or beginning to heal. He didn’t know which.

In his mind, he had a picture of him and Emma driving past the hospital in Penzance, a squat red-brick building in the center of town. It was their only visit to her hometown, made a year after their marriage. “And that’s where it all began,” Emma was saying proudly. “I came into the world at seven sharp, crying like a banshee. I haven’t shut up since. It’s where Mum died. Circle of life and all that, I guess.”

The nurse went on. “There is one problem. You’re certain that she was born in 1975?”

“Absolutely.”

“It is rather strange, you see. Was her middle name by chance ‘Everett’?”

“Yes.”

More proof that it was her. She wasn’t Eva Kruger. She was Emma. His Emma.

“I did, in fact, manage to find an Emma Everett Rose in our records,” the nurse said, her voice harder now. “She was also born on November twelfth…but a year earlier. That’s the problem.”

“There must be some kind of typo on the document. It has to be her.”

“I’m afraid not,” stated the nurse. “I don’t know quite how to say this.”

Jonathan moved to the edge of the bed. “Say what ?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but Emma Everett Rose, born November twelfth, 1974, in St. Mary’s Hospital, is dead. She was killed in a car accident two weeks after her birth, on November the twenty-sixth.”

“Is this a complete list of his postings?” Marcus von Daniken was seated in a cramped windowless office deep in the corridors of DWB headquarters. The heat was roaring, and every minute that he sat there he felt another grain of his patience slip away.

The medical organization’s director faced him across the desk. She was a fifty-year-old Somali woman who had immigrated to Switzerland twenty years ago. She had a shaved head and gold hoop earrings, and she made no effort to hide her hostility as she leaned over the shantytown of papers littering her desk and lectured him at the point of a very long, elaborately painted fingernail.

“Why shouldn’t it be a complete list?” the woman asked as she handed him Jonathan Ransom’s file. “Do I look as if I have something to hide? Ridiculous, I tell you. The whole thing. Jonathan Ransom, a murderer! It is crazy.”

Von Daniken didn’t bother to answer. The Graubünden police had preceded him by a day, and it was obvious that they’d ruffled some feathers. He’d be better off having a word with them than trying to argue with her. He accepted Ransom’s file and took his time leafing through the papers. Beirut, Lebanon. Team leader for an immunization-vaccination program. Darfur, Sudan. Director, Refugee Operations. Kosovo, Serbia. Chief medical officer leading an initiative to construct local trauma units. Sulawesi Island, Indonesia; Monrovia, Liberia. It was a list of all the world’s political hellholes.

“Is it normal for your physicians to spend so much time abroad?” he asked, glancing up from the folder. “I see here that Dr. Ransom spent two years in some of these places.”

“That’s what we do.” A disdainful sigh. Eyes to the ceiling. “Jonathan prefers the more challenging assignments. He’s one of our most committed physicians.”

“How do you mean?”

“Often the conditions are arduous. The doctor tends to lose sight of the bigger picture and gets caught up in the suffering. The futility of it can be overwhelming. We have quite a few cases of post-traumatic stress, similar to battle fatigue. But Jonathan never shied from the rougher assignments. Some of us think that it was because of Emma.”

“Emma? You mean his wife?”

“We took the view that she tended to sympathize a bit too closely with the population. ‘Going native,’ as it were.”

“Is it common for husband and wife teams to work together?”

“No one wants to get married only to leave their spouse thousands of miles behind.”

Von Daniken considered this for a moment. He was beginning to see how it might work. The postings to foreign countries. The constant travel. “And how is it decided where the doctors are sent?”

“We match their strengths to our needs. We’ve tried to lure Dr. Ransom to our Swiss headquarters for a long time. His experience in the field would inject a much-needed dose of common sense into our project evaluations.”

“I see, but who exactly decides where Dr. Ransom is assigned?”

“We do it together. The three of us. Jonathan, Emma, and I. We look at the list of openings and decide where they will be of most help.”